Presenting like… Jeremy ‘Shoemoney’ Schoemaker

Jeremy Schoemaker is a celebrity in his line of business – an online marketer or rather the affiliate marketing expert. In the second week of January he held the keynote at the Affiliate Summit 2012 in Las Vegas. In preparing this keynote Jeremy did the obvious thing and asked himself “What is key in affiliate marketing?” – and then presented his answers to the question in his speech.

If you want to understand this blogpost you will like to watch his keynote – thankfully also showing his slides – on the Shoemoney blog (it takes 37 minutes).

For the first few minutes Jeremy seems shy, later on he’s sometimes self-ironic in what he says. He goes on stage with his hands in his pockets speaking in a low voice, standing (or hiding) behind the lectern almost all of the 37 minutes. But by and by he gathers pace and you can notice that he pauses deliberately and with great effect (e.g. at 7:44) when speaking. In this video he seems a very ‘normal’ and ‘authentic’ person in accordance with who he is and was. And his biography is indeed an interesting story in itself. I’d summarize it like this: from procrastination to getting things done, from obese nerd to normal size expert, from dotcom crash debt to 8 figure turnover. Now he has a arrived at a station in life where he seemingly likes to be himself. And this is reflected by his speaker-personality: his manner could be best described as appreciatively provocative – and the lessons he ‘teaches’ speak of a bold entrepreneur. (That’s my personal point of view from this video.)

Jeremy answers the core question “What is key?” by telling a story. He’s a great storyteller because he takes his time – in this case 37 minutes – to tell it. The leitmotif is his mean would-be-girlfriend from High-School (Melissa?). She promised him to act as if she liked him if he bought her clothes and things. In the end she asked him to buy a puppy for her. He borrowed money from his parents to buy the dog; and she, well, traded the puppy for a pound of pot. — Jeremy says Melissa called him a few weeks ago to find out about “The Secret” – How can she earn a lot of money on the internet like Jeremy does? That’s the leitmotif of his storytelling.

If I analyzed the rhetoric of how Jeremy tells the punch line of this story (culminating in the slide “What kind of sick bitch trades a dog for pot?”) I’d say it wasn’t finely tuned but very colloquial – reminding me of High School talk (which is great): “She was like…” “I said…” “She was like…” “I was like…”. But Jeremy is a keynote speaker in a sponsored t-shirt (i.e. the HostZilla donated a few thousand dollars for him to wear that shirt at the event) – so his relaxed way of talking is in line with his relaxed appearance.

He makes it very clear that the story about the evil girl-friend is his leitmotif – whereas the content of his keynote is disclosing the secret of how you can earn money on the internet, e.g. nearly 133.000 dollars with Google AdSense. To keep this short – according to Jeremy it needs three lines of action to succeed in affiliate marketing:

1. exploit peoples passions for profit

2. do things that other are not willing to do

3. recognize the opportunity

He presents various examples of when and how and where he did that himself. He explains these procedures in a way that even Melissa will be able to understand. In addition, there’s one other important point. He says: “Tell a story about your product.” — Well, as already mentioned this is something he himself illustrates perfectly in this keynote.

He summarizes his speech and the story about the mean girl from High School like this: Melissa did well in exploiting his passions and doing things others wouldn’t be willing to do – but she failed because she didn’t recognize the opportunity.

Recognizing the opportunity and doing things that other people are not willing to do decides whether you succeed or fail in affiliate marketing – that’s Jeremy ‘Shoemoney’ Schoemaker’s keymessage. Unfortunately, it is very hard to hear and said under his breath. So maybe he really is shy after all.